The Horror

[J.]

Not so long ago a very close aid worker friend of mine confided that she was contemplating leaving the aid industry. Her reason: too many of her friends had died in the line of duty. She didn’t want to have that happen again. Her number was higher than mine, but then even one is already too many.

A little less long ago some grad student found me – I’m not sure how, exactly – and asked if I’d participate in a study on PTSD among humanitarian workers. I agreed. Give the younger ones a break, I always say. It was an online survey and a telephone interview, total time commitment, about 90 minutes.

Obviously my analysis is not a clinical one. It’s based on casual inferences from the questions asked (the fact that I answered a moderate or high “yes” to almost everything), but it seems that I have nearly all of the symptoms, at least to some degree.

“…recurring dreams … trouble sleeping…”

Many aid workers have had experiences far more traumatic than anything I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never been abducted or violently assaulted, for example. But I’ve been around. And after twenty years, even those less violent, less immediately traumatic experiences take their cumulative toll. The near misses, the bomb blasts, the checkpoint stops that went sideways, the friends who deployed and never returned… they add up.

Like I said, it's not a clinical diagnosis by any stretch, but it was a moment of clarity, a moment of sober truth for me.

* * *

Over the last few years I’ve found myself answering more and more email from aspiring development and relief workers, high-school, college and university students hoping to enter the aid world one day. These days I find myself with greater frequency accepting invitations to sit in a cubicle or coffee shop or Skype window and dispense career advice to newly-minted aid workers.

I’m happy to do this. I think it’s important. No one gave me advice when I was starting out, really.

But I get the sense as I talk to them that they almost long for the trauma and cynicism, the angst, the horror. They sense that these things are what make them ‘real’ aid workers. They’ve failed to really comprehend the intended irony of 99% of what’s published on Stuff Expat Aidworkers Like.

 

And if I could be indulged to dispense one piece of advice it would simply be:

Be careful what you wish for. Don’t aspire to cynicism and trauma. Don’t worry – stick around long enough and those things will happen organically. (I personally believe that both are inevitable in those who really engage for long enough.) But for all of the joking and aggrandizing and bravado of the silverbacks, these are heavier burdens to carry than you think. This is not some proud, thing for us. For all of our tough talk, we're usually softer than we let on. Don't wish for the horror.

[R.]

Hi all

this is the third time I have tried to post.. power keeps going out. When I was younger, I used to read books/ bios about humaniatarian effots in general and the films that were around. This is before the internet. I used to aspire to be like some of the people in the books and so started my career as soon as I could, at 18. here's what I wish I could of told my younger self, more than twenty years later - the expeience (s) are very different when you have them than when you read about them. Now we have personal blogs , facebook etc all these are great - they give a sense of immediate access to the development world but the key for me is they do not and cannot give the reader the sense of what it is really like no matter how much the reader feels they have. If I could tell my younger self about the toll on my personal life, my sense of the world as a fair and safe place (yes I believed it once, or the naive belief it could be so) . I would tell my younger self to be careful  what you wish for because what I didn' t know then is the traces of near misses/difficult days/everything else you can possibly happens changes you inways I can't even explain to myself. I would tell others this too - that it only takes one incident to go bad to go from a great war story to one that has tragic consequences or there will always be that one time you wish you could go back and do things differently, create a different ending.. but you have to find a way to deal effectively with competing demands, risks, and losses . Also, I wouldn't be doing anything else and would tell people to get ready to live with continual paradox

thanks for posting J and others who reply,

r

[Michael Keizer]

(I personally believe that [cynicism and trauma] are inevitable in those who really engage for long enough.)

The trauma, yes; but not the cynicism. I have worked in aid work since 2001 and seem to have managed to avoid it. But then, perhaps 11 years is not long enough yet.

[Sarah Davitt]

This is very true.  Watching your posts and other Emergency AID workers, had really defined that an exciting job in Emergency Relief is not the job I want.  I'm not interested in seeing death, dismemberment and the life fade from too many eyes.  But I think that there is something that I encounter in my non emergency work with intern programming, where the young aid workers seek some authenticity, some realness, some escape from the prefab and flatpacked world many of us come from.  This is dangerous, to the communities that we serve (because we get it wrong, as it is an ego driven effort)  and dangerous to ourselves as it puts us in places where the value of the facebook post is worth more than our lives and limbs.  We see these big adventures in crossing the line as life defining, when the small adventures do just the same if you/I/we let them.

But for those who can hack it.  Who have the skills to hack it, who have the softer skills to understand the impact of all the things, and the self awareness to know when you are broken and need to stop -- godspeed.